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Experimenting with #Yandex

I saw it mentioned on a site about Russian news last week and will be using it for search & translate functionality for now if I want to use a search engine. I’ve added as a search engine on computer and mobile versions of Mozilla Firefox and temporarily set as default on both. I’m using in English at the moment, Russian is improving but somewhat snail-like.

I’m not making a geopolitical statement, I do not follow a binary US vs Russia or Russia vs US path and if it comes to ‘controlling the world’s information’ or anything else, it is not one or the other in spite of nearly every media outlet that I follow wants you to believe right now.

Some of their data processing and algorithmic techniques are being used by CERN and others for several years. They started before Google and others – which is intriguing. They have a lot of APIs available. It offers useful examples for how to search. It has also received a favourable review from Phil Bradley.

It is performing ok so far but too early to tell. It coped with spelling mistakes. I wouldn’t expect there to be the same kind of UK results as duckduckgo or others as yet.

Its image search does not have a copyright options filter. I use and train others in using this – if Yandex put this in, I will use them more often. It’s sometimes useful to be able to compare across multiple sources e.g. something like Everypixel (although this includes limited results which are often not free), or individual sites (updated):